Jah Rastafari did not get support from “SASOD” and “RISE GUYANA”

Mar 06, 2018 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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However, psychically twisted, psychologically depraved, and mentally ill-shaped society is in Guyana, classes, strata and organisations are generally honest about their feelings, attitudes, and postures toward their fellow Guyanese; that trait should be respected.
You cannot be left to hang out to dry when you dealing with honest humans. You will find their beliefs awfully nauseating but you will not be deceived by them because they show you without subtleties how they feel.
Organisations like SASOD, the Bar Association, the Women’s Lawyers Associations, the Private Sector Commission, Red Thread, Help and Shelter, ACDA, and Guyana Arrival Committee, should not get our support and admiration because they operate with deliberate philosophical ignorance of what the threads are that hold a free society together.
Although they don’t quibble about the rights of others, they are honest about what they say and do.
The Private Sector Commission (PSC) is a good place to start. Basically, a pro-Indian outfit, it is my view that the businessmen in that outfit will never be happy with African leadership and the PNC administration in this country.
Many reasons explain this. An elongation of such a theme space will not permit but you can find its reasoning in the writings of someone like Ravi Dev and to a lesser extent, Hindu priest Aksharananda, and columnists like Dr, Baytoram Ramharack, Dr. Lomarsh Roopnarine, Ryhaan Shah all of whom vent their anger in the Indian-owned Guyana Times newspaper.
It goes like this. Indians are intrinsically the capitalist foundation of Guyana, which guarantees and perpetuates its existence and provide for its future. It is unnatural and harmful to a country if the political infrastructure is incongruous with such a society and it is incongruous because the state institutions are staff by a different race. Indian business, which is the physiology of Guyana needs to be protected by an Indian mind.
It was for this reason these people are deeply worried by the advent of African Guyanese in strategic areas of the total state ensemble. When the PPP was in power, Dev killed off his theory of Indian ethnic security dilemma. Now the PNC is in power, Dev has resurrected that jumbie theory and writes about it non-stop.
Aksharanada wants to see an ethnic impact statement about employment in the public sector (God help those students at that man’s school).
This is the world that the PSC subscribes to. It was a sycophant of the Jagdeo/ Ramotar presidency. Suddenly, the PSC is more active than even the political parties that Guyana has ever seen it.
The PSC sermonizes each day against the directions and policies of the government. It never penned one line against the political excesses and morbid autocracy of fifteen years of Jagdeo’s hegemony. But despite this repugnancy, the PSC does not pretend. You cannot accuse it of being untrue to its true feelings.
It is the same with all the other organisations listed here. They fight for liberty, justice and rights from within a narrow perspective. ACDA for Africans; IAC for East Indians; SASOD for LGBT folks; RISE GUYANA for parking meters victims, but human rights are best guaranteed when the rights of different races and classes are made to be interwoven and thus should not be separated.
Justice will never come to a society when rights are dissected and treated as separate entities. That is the lesson history teaches us. History is rich in such a philosophical warning.
When a society allows an East Indian to be discriminated against, and African people see it as none of their business, then a boomerang effect is inevitable.
When Indian people see the discrimination against an African businessman as none of their business, the disinterest may come back to haunt them. When the LGBT community fights only for their group’s rights and look down on the injustices meted out to the Rastafari of Guyana, they are being short-sighted.
Last week Monday, the Rastafari community had a march from Buxton to Square of the Revolution. The object was to protest what has become an anachronism in the modern world – the jailing of teenagers and young people for possession of a gram or two of ganja and the mere possession of a smoking utensil.
The SASOD people and RISE GUYANA, which championed the fight against the parking meter abomination of City Hall should have been there at the conclusion of the march to at least lend moral support. It was a moral obligation on the part of every group that struggles for rights and justice. Do you know none of the daily newspapers carried any report on the march? Do you know why?

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